WEST PARIS – Town officials still do not know why there was a discrepancy between the tax notices and tax bills sent to residents.

But they are working to get the answer.

Saturday, James Phillips, co-owner of Trio Software in Bangor, reviewed the information used in a recent computer upgrade to see if the numbers were incorrectly interpreted.

He said they were not.

The old system had been using DOS software and the Trio System used Windows software.

Selectman Wade Rainey said more than 100 taxpayers have called and visited the town office because their tax bills were more than the tax notices.

Rainey and Town Clerk Cheryl Shattenberg together have talked to more than 50 residents and about 100 remain on a list.

The town had hired Kevin McGillicuddy, who owned his own assessing service, to do a revaluation. He is also the current assessor for the town of Paris.

McGillicuddy did the revaluation, sent tax notices to the townspeople and was available for two weeks to handle questions from the townspeople.

“After the hearings and the day before selectmen committed taxes, I turned over all the materials to the board,” McGillicuddy stated in a fax to the Sun Journal. “At which time they accepted and my contract was 100 percent fulfilled.

“If there were issues with the computer system and data transfer to an updated version of the software, this was after I had completed what my contract called for,” McGillicuddy wrote.

“The numbers that went on the tax bills were the numbers given to the town by McGillicuddy,” Phillips said.

He said the Windows program read the DOS program and there were no errors in the translation.

This was perplexing to Rainey and Shattenberg because the problem did not exist across the board in all tax bills.

Shattenberg said about 10 to 15 percent of the town’s 1,162 tax bills had problems.

Phillips took several copies of the tax notices in question to his Bangor office to analyze.

Rainey said he will copy the tax notices of those who come in to discuss their discrepancies and then send them to Phillips.

Phillips said he was going to look at as many erroneous notices and tax bills as he could to see if there was a common denominator to the problems.

Rainey said he had enough appointments in the next three weeks to give Phillips a good sampling of notices versus bills in the next three weeks.

“Hopefully, we can find out why they don’t match,” Rainey said.

jsmedley@sunjournal.com